BIM Essentials Tip #1

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in BIM Essentials

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The theme of this series of posts will be “bite-sized BIM” — easily digestible tips, tricks, and hints to help everyday Revit users be more productive.

Tip #1: View Templates

View Templates are a favorite tool of BIM Managers, because they provide control over the graphic settings for plotted views. Turn on or off a linked model, override the graphics for a model category, use filters to select specific objects — it’s all there. Also available are additional parameters for sorting view within the Project Browser, so you can keep your Working, Printed, and Coordination views separate.

1B   1A

Anything with its box checked in the right-hand image above cannot be modified in the regular Visibility Graphics dialog. So if you’re trying to change a graphics setting in your view and can’t…look for a view template! (But don’t change that template without talking to your model manager.)

If you enjoyed this first course, be sure to stay tuned…there’s plenty more where this came from!

I’m baaaack….

18 Thursday Jun 2015

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Have you ever intended to take a short break from something, but then find that the length of the break keeps stretching…and stretching…and then you realize it’s been over a year since your last blog post?

Well, apparently that’s what happened to me. I didn’t mean to take all that time off, but so much has been going on this past year that the blog got pushed to the back burner.

At any rate, it’s summer again in DC and the heat is back on! (Please excuse my mixed metaphors.) I have a whole pile of content just waiting to be written up, from some tips & tricks I presented at local Revit meetings to tidbits from my upcoming RTCNA class to gripes about phases (still!) in Revit 2016.

I hope you’ve all had a good year, and I’ll see you again here soon. Promise!

Line Breaks in Revit Text

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Tips & Tricks

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Today’s tip is about making new endings and new beginnings…for lines of text in Revit.

Did you know you can manually insert line breaks into view titles and schedule text fields? All it takes is Ctrl+Enter. Here’s a view of a schedule before and after I inserted a line break:

Image Image

It only looks like the second half of the line is gone–you can still access it with your arrow keys. And of course, you can see the entire text on the sheet, like this:

Image

A similar trick works for view titles whose contents don’t wrap nicely in the default field width. The only thing to remember is that you have to use Ctrl+Enter in the Title on Sheet field, NOT the View Name field. Before & after:

Image

Image

Thanks to this feature, you don’t have to worry so much about the length of text fields in titles — just make them as long as possible and add line breaks later.

RAM and Revit: Second Thoughts

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Analysis

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Time for an update on our Revit-RAM process!

First, some successes: We’ve been doing a lot of one-way transfers, Revit to RAM, with pretty good success. It helps that Bentley released a 64-bit version of the ISM link, reducing model export times by a LOT. One engineer in my office modeled up a steel-framed building (with something like 2000 columns) in Revit, exported it to RAM Structural System, and ran an analysis in about 2 hours. I did the same thing with a 53-story concrete building in about 4 hours. And for that building, we also brought the new column and wall sizes back into Revit! I hope it is the first of many round-trips.

It hasn’t been an unqualified success. RAM still doesn’t read the analytical location of structural elements, which can lead to some quirks when importing and exporting elements. For example, steel columns are almost always centrally aligned, but concrete columns are often aligned by face. Same thing with walls; sometimes the centers line up, sometimes the hold point is one edge or another. Not all the walls came back from RAM with the correct hold line, but I can’t be positive I modeled them correctly in the first place, so I’ll have to try again another time. Face-aligned concrete columns are at least a little easier to tweak if necessary.

Concrete floors on metal deck still don’t transfer very well, and we’re still doing all our load assignments in RAM because we aren’t trying to use multiple analytical packages on the same model. But the biggest disappointment so far has been rebar. RAM SS will design rebar, of course, and it can export it back to Revit…as 3D rebar. Which we’re not using yet. So I haven’t been able to find a way to automate the population of the column schedule with the appropriate rebar. Maybe by the time I write “third thoughts” we’ll have made some progress…

But honestly, I think there will always be one major deal-breaker when it comes to a true 2-way transfer of information: engineering judgment. Engineering analysis and design does not always require the same precision that a set of construction documents does. It just doesn’t, and it never will. Tweaks to a slab edge condition that require changes to every floor plan and section cut in Revit may not have any effect on the structural design at all — so what do you do? Stop sending the floors back and forth? Send them back and update the design model? Break the link entirely? All potentially valid options depending on how big the discrepancy is and how far along you are in the design process.

Even with the drawbacks, though, the process is constantly improving and evolving. Here’s to progress!

Goverlan Remote Administration

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in IT

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Part of my role as Digital Design Manager involves coordinating installations of new & updated software programs. It’s the main area where I overlap with IT — they can handle a lot of the legwork, but keeping up with new releases (and deciding when to roll them out) is mine.

For a long time, we were small enough that we could get away with “sneaker-net” installations…actually walking around to each computer to run the install or start the deployment. But at 140 people, that method is a little ridiculous — not to mention that it provides absolutely no means of inventory control.

So to save us all a lot of time & headaches, we use Goverlan Remote Administration. Goverlan is an all-in-one IT console for management, installation, and inventory. You can control network machines remotely (with more flexibility and convenience than Windows Remote Desktop), set up packages to deploy software, uninstall old software, and manage network properties.

I don’t get into the last item very much (my IT managers are better at that than I am), but the remote control & installs have been an amazing time-saver. This morning, I pushed out a new version of SAP 2000 to 30 machines in about 10 minutes — counting time for setup & testing. And before I did that, I ran an inventory query (in about 2 minutes) that told me which machines needed the update.

Having remote control capabilities means I can quickly see another machine from my desk, either to test a remote installation or launch something directly (if for some reason we don’t have a deployment package). It is SO much easier than walking over to the other machine (yes, I’m a little lazy), and if I’m using it for troubleshooting, my colleague can see her screen at the same time, so it’s easier to figure out what’s going on. Once or twice, though, I’ve checked to see that someone was out of the office before taking over his computer…only to find out that he was logged in from home. (“Hey, why is my mouse moving by itself?” Oops.)

I know this is probably very basic compared to the setups some of you have. And I’m sure I’m not using what we have to its full potential. But Goverlan is very user-friendly even for those of us who aren’t IT professionals. And when you compare it to what we used to have, we’re happy with it. It’s pretty cheap too, as far as these things go, and I think it paid for itself in the first few months in terms of IT time saved. (And to be clear, my only relationship with Goverlan & PJ Technologies is as a customer.)

Anybody else out there using Goverlan? Or something else you’d like to recommend?

Standards: Process vs. Outcome

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Standards, Thoughts

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One of my (many) projects these days is wrangling our long-standing CAD standards and much-newer BIM standards into a single, unified “Graphics Standards Manual”. As I try to get a grip on this spaghetti bowl of topics, I’ve started to divide them into two categories: process and outcome. You could also call it screen vs. plot. Or, in complete sentences: “How does it act?” vs. “How does it look?”

Today, these two halves of a model or drawing are about equal. I suspect, as we continue to move closer to IPD, the “process” side will begin to prevail. Today, however, I’m more likely to see a QC comment complaining about the symbol representing a kicker than about the fact that it’s a faked-in detail component when it should have been modeled.

This philosophical division also helps categorize standards topics into “CAD”, “BIM”, and “graphics”. The first two are process-based, such as project setup procedures for each system. The last is outcome-based, such as our typical abbreviations and acronyms. Some topics span all three categories, like the information contained in a graphical column schedule. What that schedule looks like is part of Graphics, but getting it there is part of CAD/BIM.

I’m still working on the best way to organize all these discrete yet related topics. My ideal scenario would be a fully-linked searchable database or website. For now, we have OneNote. It’s pretty good, but harder to lock down against inadvertent editing than I would like.

As I keep writing things down, I’ll post the categorization here, but in the meantime, how do you handle unified standards for separate software solutions?

Insert screenshot in MS Office products

11 Thursday Jul 2013

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Okay, so this is not really BIM-related at all, but I haven’t posted here in over two months (sometimes life gets in the way of blogging) and when I found this I just had to share it. And if any of you have to create presentations, write training materials, or just put a lot of images in emails, you’ll like it as much as I do.

Here it is: Open up just about any Microsoft Office 2010 product (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint) and check out the Insert tab.

InsertScreenshot

Did anyone else miss the fact that there’s a screenshot option right in plain view? I guess my gaze usually stops on “Picture.” And to be fair, if your window is small enough the icon may get collapsed into the mini-version:

InsertScreenshotMini

Click on it, and you’ll get images of every open program you have. Pick one to drop in a full-size image of that window, or choose the “Screen Clipping” option to define your own area. (Note that the current program will minimize while you take your clipping.)

Is that cool or what?

Working vs. Sheet views

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Basics, Thoughts, Views

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When I first came back to working in Revit, I wasn’t convinced of the need to separate “working” views from “plotting” views. I’d never used them in AutoCAD, why start now? Can’t you just hide stuff you don’t need?

Gotta say, though, I became a fan pretty quickly. What changed my mind?

Working Sections 

When you’re working in 3D, a 2D view doesn’t always tell the whole story. (Or even half the story.) Want to see what’s really going on in your plan? Cut a section! Didn’t quite answer the question? Cut another section! Before you know it, your view is chock full of section cuts that you don’t actually need as part of your set.

WorkingView

Rather than letting section cuts clutter up your views, at our office we change them to a “working section” type and use a filter to turn them off in plotted views. We’ve found it helps eliminate confusion between what’s a “real” section and what’s not.

PlottingSection

“Real” (a.k.a. plotting) section

WorkingSection

“Working” section

Temporary Annotations 

I was modeling an existing structure the other day, and I needed to keep track of the top of caisson elevations. The easiest way to do this was to tag them all with spot elevations — but I did not want that information on the actual plan. Instead, I hopped over into the working view and tagged away.

WorkingView2

They didn’t have to look pretty, because they’ll never appear on paper. I like to think of working views as the digital equivalent of scratch paper. You can scribble all you want, knowing you won’t mess up your sheet. And if you decide later that you do need some of those annotations or sections on the plotting sheet, you can easily copy the annotations or change the section back to a regular type.

Watch out for real objects

The one caveat I would give for working views is that if you change something real, like a wall or a door, you’d better go back and check that in your plotting view to make sure it still looks the way you want it to. Real annotations such as dimensions and spot elevations should follow their hosts, but detail components might not and text notes definitely won’t.

Don’t blame the software…

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Thoughts

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Have you ever noticed that people tend to blame software for project problems? Or worse, for people problems?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and decided to post after I read Robert Green’s Cadalyst series on the “tool worship trap“. These articles describe how easy it can be to get caught up in the promises of new software (and yes, I’ve been there!), and the reality checks you need to be sure your expectations don’t get out of hand.

But this attitude has a flip side: fear of new technology. Or if not fear exactly, a transference of existing issues onto new software. I’m mostly thinking about Revit today, but there will probably be more examples in a future post.

  • “We’re over budget because we did this project in Revit.” (Are you sure it’s not because of all the client-driven changes?)
  • “Revit should have notified us that the slab openings moved.” (Maybe. But how would we have handled this in AutoCAD?)
  • “I thought coordination would be easier now.” (Well, it can be. But you still have to talk to each other.)

Basically, whenever I hear a complaint or an objection to a Revit-based process, I try to find out if it’s an issue now anyway, regardless of software, and whether it’s something that we could fix if we just talked to the person on the other end.

Revit’s not perfect. (Far from it…although it is getting better all the time.) But I don’t think it deserves all the blame it accumulates for problems that are either long-standing collaboration challenges — that could be just as true for two people working on a Word doc — or that can be traced to other project management issues.

Just some Friday musings…

Drag Listening Dimensions

29 Monday Apr 2013

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If you’ve used Revit at all, I’m sure you know what a listening dimension is, even if you’ve never heard the term before. They’re the temporary dimensions that show up when you select an object.

Listening1

They’re GREAT to have — I use them all the time when I know what the distance should be between two points or objects.

But the listening dimensions don’t always show up where you want them. In the image above, maybe I need to set the distance from the selected beam to grid 6.

Before I learned the trick I’m going to share with you, I would have added a dimension from the the beam to the grid, changed my measurement, and deleted the dimension. But no longer!

Instead, I learned (I forget where, sorry) that you can just adjust the listening dimension. Grab the blue dot (the tooltip will say “move witness line” and drag it to your preferred reference.

Listening2

Voilà!

And what’s more, this relocation is sticky — the listening dimension will appear in the same (new) place the next time you select that object.